


not how you were supposed to say good-bye

by amainiris



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Endings, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-11-01 22:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20535350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/amainiris
Summary: The worst farewells must be the ones that are never spoken.





	not how you were supposed to say good-bye

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old fic, so I can't exactly vouch for quality. Still, here we go.

> _you cannot make houses out of human beings_

_Love isn't blind,_ Sansa thinks. _It's all-seeing._

She's only felt this way a few times before: this queer mix of grief and transcendence. The first time had been when Lady died, and she'd been just a little girl, blind to the horrors of the world. Sansa had felt it again when she'd heard word of her brother and lady mother's deaths; she'd cried herself raw, until her very insides ached with every breath. And she had experienced it most powerfully of all when she'd witnessed the beheading of her father: a sublime, surreal ache that sliced through her bones, left her body weak and trembling.

Margaery Tyrell looks like something from a summer's dream.

She is resplendent in ivory silk and Myrish lace, her skirts decorated with floral patterns made of seed pearls. And her maiden cloak! No Baratheon colors for her, so somber and heavy; no, that's not Margeary, Sansa thinks. That's not Margaery at all. And indeed, the cloak is green velvet, with a hundred cloth-of-gold roses sewn into it. Sansa is almost struck dumb by her beauty: the rosebud mouth slightly parted, the wide almost-golden eyes and the flushed pale skin. But foolishly, to her, Margaery has never been anything less than beautiful.

_She is something that you want,_ Sansa thinks to herself, _but something that you cannot have._

_Something you do not deserve._

But then, isn't that what they say beauty is?

Sansa swallows as Tyrion takes her arm.

_Something you do not deserve._

_But life is like that_, Margaery had whispered to her sadly in the shadow of the Red Keep. _Everyone loves the wrong person._

But it's not wrong, Sansa had wanted to say. If this was wrong, then everything else must be wrong as well: the way their legs intertwined so silk-smooth, the way Margaery's fingers adeptly undid her laces, the way their mouths met hungry and red. And it wasn't, Sansa thought. None of it was wrong. How could it be?

The worst goodbyes must be the ones that are never said.

Margaery knows this now, as she looks down over the crowd that has gathered, as she sees Sansa's white, stricken face. And she's remembering how they met in her rooms last night, and how Sansa had stood there trembling just a little, her lips pressed stubbornly together. She'd refused to cry. So instead Margaery had kissed her, murmured, "I'm sorry, Sansa, I'm sorry, we can't choose who we marry, and we can't choose who we love."

And Sansa had simply left, leaving nothing but silence between them.

Sansa wishes that she could have loved Tyrion the way she loves Margaery.

But it's too late for that now.

_You should have told me,_ she thinks as the ceremony passes in a haze. _You should have promised me that I could do this without you. I never thought I needed anyone until I met you._

She shouldn't even allow herself to think the words, she knows. But she's been doing a lot of things that she shouldn't as of late: meeting with Dontos in the godswood, treating her maidservants with a sort of brusque shortness borne out of despair, being cold to her Lannister husband. _And kissing Margaery Tyrell_, she thinks. That's what truly comes to mind even when the months flow together in an endless blur of Lannister crimson and gold, of mailed Kingsguard hands beating her bloody: Margaery Tyrell and her sweet face, the hands that mapped over Sansa's body and the lips that skimmed the violent bruises that bloomed on her skin.

Yes, the first thing that comes to mind is Margaery, Margaery and her dusky voice, low like a mother's, as she made Sansa all the promises in the world and kept none of them at all.

"My lady."

It is Tyrion offering her his arm, and Sansa takes it stiffly. She does not look down at him as they leave the sept.

Everything is going to pieces. She lost her father, she lost her brothers, her sister, she lost her lady mother. Now she's losing the only thing she has left.

If you had told her, before she'd met the Tyrell girl, that she would be saddened to leave King's Landing, Sansa would have laughed. She would have laughed until she cried. Funny how a thing as foolish as a heart can change things irrevocably.

It's odd, Sansa thinks, how one remembers all the things one wants to forget. How one forgets all the things one wants to remember.

Her mother's face is already strange in her memory; the red of her hair is blurred. She cannot recall the exact shape of Robb's eyes, nor the pitch of Bran's voice.

She's afraid she will forget the sound of Margaery's laughter.

"I feared we'd never escape," Tyrion remarks as they step out into the clear autumn day.

"Yes, my lord. As you say." Now she cannot keep the sadness from her face, though she tries, valiantly. "It was such a beautiful ceremony, though."

And it had been beautiful; Margaery had made it so. And the day is nearly as beautiful as she was.

Their litter is warm from the sun. Sansa sits and stares at her hands, trying to determine when it all had changed: when she'd grown so old yet remained so young. Was love supposed to age a person? It hadn't seemed like that, in the stories she'd read when she was a silly little girl. But the stories were wrong anyway, she knows now. The stories never ended like this.

_She made it clear to me that it was over,_ Sansa thinks to herself, blindly. _But she didn't tell me why. Did she ever love me at all?_ Her breath catches, just slightly. _She doesn't need me. Not like I need her. I thought someone finally loved me for more than my claim, I thought---_

"I had been thinking that when the roads are safe again, we might journey to Casterly Rock. It would please me to show you the Golden Gallery and the Lion's Mouth, and the Hall of Heroes where Jaime and I played as boys. You can hear thunder from below where the sea comes in..."

Sansa raises her head slowly. She looks at her husband, tries to feel the kindness that she knows is there. She can't. You cannot force yourself to love someone. And anyway, by tonight, she will be gone. Away from King's Landing. Away from Tyrion. Away from Margaery.

"I shall go wherever my lord husband wishes."

"I had hoped it might please you, my lady."

"It will please me to please my lord."

She sees his mouth tighten. "No, it was a foolish notion. Only a Lannister can love the Rock."

"Yes, my lord. As you wish."

He has been kind to her, she thinks. He's tried, anyway. In another life she might have thanked him. But in another life she hadn't met Margaery Tyrell.

Sansa and her husband walk around the yard, and Sansa performs the necessary niceties. She tells Lord Gyles that his cough is sounding better, and compliments Elinor Tyrell on her lovely new gown. She even asks Jalabhar Xho about wedding customs on the Summer Isles. Tyrion looks proud; Sansa feels weak in the knees.

"I know you feel weak right now,'' Margaery had murmured to her, after she too had heard about the deaths of Sansa's brother and lady mother. She'd been the image of compassion, for once startlingly, vividly genuine. It had almost broken Sansa's heart all over again. "You're not weak."

"I am," Sansa had said. "I am. That's all all I've ever been."

"You're strong," Margaery had assured her, firmly. "But you know that's not why I love you."

Something had expanded within Sansa's chest, made her faint and dizzy. 

"Why do you love me?"

"Because I can't not," Margaery had said, and for once she wasn't smiling. And then they'd sat there for a very long time, heads bowed together, neither speaking a single word.

Sansa fears for her, in truth.

_I have to stay here, even though I hate it. I have to protect her from them._

But she knows she can't; she knows that she _won't._ Winterfell is the only thing she needs more than she needs the other girl. Winterfell is the only thing in the world that might be able to put her back together again.

Sansa hates herself a little for that. She hates how wounded she is now, how heavy. She hates how she sees snow when she closes her eyes, the high walls of Winterfell, Rickon's fierce lost face. She's a Stark, after all, though they've clad her in golden and crimson, given her a Lannister husband to wed and a Lannister prison in which to languish. Though it hadn't always felt so much like suffering, when Margaery had been near.

A thousand years ago she'd dreamed of a handsome golden prince to love her. Yet the prince had been the monster, in the end, and Margaery had appeared from nowhere with that soft smile and illuminating laugh. Sansa hadn't even been aware of how bleak the world had grown until the Tyrell girl was there to cast some light onto her darkness.

_She's the one good thing,_ Sansa thinks dully, _in a city full of cruel and terrible and unjust things._

But none of that matters, now.

She is finally going to get what she's prayed for ever since they slaughtered her father.

She is going to go home.


End file.
